HONEST TO GOD
After he saw what death could be like, Professor John Wren-Lewis, the man who inspired the book 'Honest To God', has become an evangelist.
Prof. Lewis, 70, who now lives in Sydney, has recovered from his 'near-death' experience in South-East Thailand and become a changed man.
The professor had accepted a toffee on a bus from 'a handsome, polite, well-dressed young man,' and found himself dangerously ill in a Thai hospital having been saved from a morphia-and-cocaine overdose.
'I wish it had happened to me many years ago,' says the scientist who has spent much of his life trying to prove that there is no God. 'Who would?' he asks, 'have willingly gone on living a life of quiet desperation if he could have had something else?'
The young man on the 9.15 AM bus clutching his bag of sweets, was a gangster who made a living drugging tourists on trains and buses and taking their wallets when they collapsed into sleep.
'My mother's words raced through my mind when I accepted the sweet: 'Never take candies from strangers.'
Prof. Lewis's mother had a superstitious fear of God. That He was like a vindictive black cloud. A worker who had uttered the word 'Gorblimey' had, she believed, been struck deaf because of it.
Filled with dread, John Wren-Lewis turned to science with evangelistic fervour and became a mathematical physicist, eventually recognised as a world expert in futuristic studies.
In the 50s and 60s he became known for his writings on the relationship between science and religion and an initiator of the 'death of God' movement.
It was then that John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, phoned him from his sick bed ('he had a slipped disc') and asked if he could read some of Wren-Lewis's papers.
'He then wrote to me and said I had inspired him to write a book that would be a good discussion-point for students. I had read his manuscript and felt that when it was published, the sparks would really fly.
'I was in the US, and phoned my wife in England, to check in. She told me 'Honest To God' had been published and there were reporters surrounding our house demanding to know about the scientist who had turned the Bishop of Woolwich into an atheist!'
Now Prof. Wren-Lewis is writing his own book, 'The 9.15 To Nirvana', which explains his 'shattering' experience in Thailand and his dramatic conversion to a belief that has changed his life.
His near-death experience, he says, had no angels in white robes, nor long-dead relatives talking to him in corridors. 'But I had been in the most uncannily, marvellous place.
'I awakened to find myself in a hospital room with the smell of toilets, the sound of coughing and paint flaking from the walls. Yet everything seemed so marvellous! A gloomy-looking doctor came in and I believed he was going to tell me the worst: that I was going to die. In fact he probably had a stomach-ache and he said it was OK for me to leave the next day.
'I was feeling this extraordinary sensation - I didn't mind if I died. I was delighted to be there and alive, but dying was alright. As a scientist I wanted the scientific facts. I had this absolute 'aliveness'; aliveness in which there is no time. I had sneered at it from a great height before. I had read the mystics and knew that near-death experiences resembled mystical experiences, in many ways.
'Now the joke was on me. As my Cockney father would have said, it was a right turn-up for the books. It was recognising something that had been there all the time and I hadn't noticed it.
'My mind was more active than I had ever known it before or since. It was absolutely racing. I began to see the meaning in some of the things that had been said about God. There was darkness - and that was part of God - light conveys the image of a thing or another person to the brain. But now light was superfluous. God was a sort of 'home'. And I was 'at' home. My body was being loved into existence. And it is still happening, right up to this minute.
'My life now is spent writing and broadcasting about what has happened to me. So-called ordinary life is a cosmic sleep in which we all play parts in a great drama; we improvise as we go along. God is writing the script in each of us. You are in a role.
'Now every fibre of my being is aware of the joy of moving in the line of time.'
Prof. Wren-Lewis does not pray before he goes to sleep, 'in the conventional way'. 'But my life is a constant state of prayer. I go to church occasionally. But I devote my life to spreading the news about what has happened to me. When I knew the feeling wasn't going to go away, I told my partner, Anne, about it.'
He no longer has the same sense of pain, though for many years he had a cowardly attitude to being hurt. 'If I have a sore throat I realise it's just the cells doing their job fighting bacteria or a virus and I tell them to get on with it.'
